FOURTH REFINEMENT

---Materials: a crafting knife, pages from sketchbook, a cutting mat, white charcoal, a sponge, a paint brush, blue acrylic, white acrylic and black acrylic.

>My aim today is to change the idea of using the outline of buildings or stencils as an abstract but focusing on adding the abstract over the buildings. In addition to this, I will try making the skyline of the buildings more visible through the abstract learning from my past refinement.

In my refinements, I realized that blue acrylic is quite dark when put straight unto a surface. Even though I like the dark blue colour used in my abstract, I wanted the abstract to have a lighter feel. In order to achieve this, I used white acrylic first and put it onto the page using the hard part of the sponge and spreading it across the page. I then added the blue acrylic on top of the white which made the blue a lighter shade. For the next step, I added some black in the middle and in the four corners of the piece to balance the painting. I then drew a diagonal line and added my technique unto the line following the rule of thirds as the viewer would look at the top left-center and then the bottom of the piece before looking at the painting in general. For the background, I made the abstract have a lighter tone so that the skyline of the buildings would be visible when adding a heavy colored abstract over the light coloured background.

 

In conclusion, I think this was a success compared to my other refinement because from a distance it looks like just a normal piece of abstract, but then when you look carefully you can see that the buildings within the abstract create the idea of an illusion. I prefer how my technique is looking like now in comparison to my third refinement.  I really like how I left some spaces in my abstract instead of painting the whole page blue. In addition, I think the rule of thirds worked well as my eyes were following the abstract from the middle, however I did not firstly look at the top-right center of the piece.When I showed people this piece, I understood that everyone had different areas of the piece they looked at first (following the rules of third) but the main focus point was the middle. What I would do differently, next time, is use a different colour like green or yellow- the reason being that the different colours could express my abstract in a different way.